Introduction
The photograph, which was taken at an undetermined date between 1907 and 1914, depicts a typical scene of colonial imagery: at the centre, an apparently European man in tropical hunting gear proudly presents his hunted down booty – a large bird of prey – spreading its wings to display their big span. His friendly face reveals a simultaneously happy and proud smile that shows the satisfaction and joy of his hunting adventure. In the background, parts of a house are visible. On the veranda, a person of African descent observes the scene. His face is barely visible, but his long white dress suggests that he worked as a personal servant for the pictured hunter.Footnote 1 The servant’s ‘facelessness’ and the proud presentation of the hunting booty nurtured ideas of European domination over the people and nature of Africa. Accordingly, both had to be tamed and thus civilised through the colonisers’ intrusion.Footnote 2
The hunting ‘sporting code’ was crucial to identify not only the ruling race, but also class belonging and corresponding upbringing. In a colonial setting, hunting, as former privilege of Europe’s nobility, became an activity pursued and cherished by many colonisers not only of upper-class descent but also with middle- and working-class backgrounds. Taking up the nobility’s leisure activity in the colonies thus contributed to the colonisers’ self-image of being legitimate rulers over beast and man. Hunting thus resembled and enacted colonial dominance at the same time. Especially the big game hunt contributed to boost a coloniser’s identity into that of a virile colonial ruler. Autobiographic hunting stories therefore addressed the readers’ expectation that colonial rule would tame African wildlife and thus civilize vast territories.Footnote 3 If accompanied by photography “possessing a picture of oneself killing something else might also be seen as a very powerful subject position. […][T]he hunter becomes the active subject, embodying a manly colonial ideal.”Footnote 4 Haschemi Yekani’s general observation regarding the interrelationship between the colonial hunt and photography is certainly applicable to Figure 1. Examining the biography of the supposedly European hunter more closely, however, illuminates the variety and diversity of mechanisms and strategies of European identification that were mobilised for private, commercial, and political aims to access resources and influence in different geographical and temporal contexts. For the hunter in Figure 1, these contexts spanned from German East Africa (GEA), via India to (post)colonial Germany. His name was Ranga Reinhardt Kaundinya and he became a citizen of the German Kingdom of Württemberg in 1911.
Ranga Kaundinya Presenting a Bird of Prey as Hunting Booty in GEA ca. 1910. Source: Stadtmuseum Wendlingen (Neckar). Diashow Kilossa 1907–1916.
Figure 1 Long description
A black-and-white historical photograph shows a smiling man seated on the edge of a wooden porch or veranda. He wears a light coloured suit, boots, and a broad-brimmed hat, with a strap crossing diagonally over his chest. In each hand, he holds a long, narrow hunting implement pointed upward. In front of him, a large bird of prey is positioned on a raised rectangular platform. The bird’s wings are fully extended outward, revealing broad layered feathers and a wide wingspan. Its head faces slightly downward while its talons grip the platform surface. The man appears to be presenting the captured bird for the camera. The background includes wooden railings, dark doorway shadows, and rough structural elements of the building, contributing to the documentary and colonial-era appearance of the image.
Ranga was born into an Indo-German missionary family in 1863. His father Herrmann Anandrao was the son of a Brahmin family and later became a Christian missionary in India. On behalf of the Basel Mission and alongside his wife, a southwest German, he became the first – and, for a long time, the only – Christian missionary of Indian descent. Besides having close friends among his fellow European missionaries, Herrmann Anandrao also met with reservations as other members of the Basel Mission wanted to exclude him from missionary education in Switzerland, for example.Footnote 5 In his autobiography, published in 1854 in the tradition of Revivalist Literature, Herrmann Kaundinya certainly attempted to comply with the traditions of the Protestant faith to gain acceptance as devout Christian.Footnote 6 His first-born son, Ananda (1861–1914), also worked most of his life in India after spending some of his childhood in Europe. In the British colony, he unsuccessfully attempted to become a civil servant for the British colonial authorities that did not employ so-called ‘Eurasians.’Footnote 7 Second born, Ranga Kaundinya (1863–1920), spent his formative years in Basel, Switzerland, and in southwest Germany. He later moved close to his parents’ place in southwest India where he farmed several cash crop plantations for over twenty years. In 1907, he became manager of a cotton plantation in GEA run by the Swabian textile company Otto, whose owners had known Ranga Kaundinya since his youth in Germany.Footnote 8 As the manager of Otto’s plantation in Kilossa, he faced discrimination from both the German colonial administration, who regarded him as an incompetent “half-caste man,”Footnote 9 and his own European subordinate plantation personnel because he had “Indian blood in his veins.”Footnote 10 Confronted with these identifications of others in his daily life and working routine, Ranga Kaundinya pursued several strategies to position his identity in Germany, its colony in East Africa, and British colonial India.
Kaundinya’s self-identification resulted from the complex interplay of race, class, gender as well as religion and was acted out in social practice. Besides Ranga’s visual performance as virile colonial hunter as revealed in Figure 1, the article investigates how Kaundinya produced his identity in two German publications released during WWI. The examination of his texts offers a perspective on how an individual developed an (European) identity in colonial frameworks and dynamics of power across three continents and two empires. Framing the social circumstances of late nineteenth and early twentieth century colonising societies, I first link the concept of ‘passing for white’ to the historiography on German colonialism. It gives an idea about what individuals like Ranga Kaundinya could or could not hope to achieve in his given social situations. Secondly, I outline his individual strategies to pass as European in both colonial East Africa and (post) WWI Germany. Thirdly, this article reveals the interconnections between Kaundinya’s self-image as an experienced German colonial planter and his Pietist backgrounds. Fourthly, I show that Kaundinya used his Indian background to foster his identity as an experienced middle-class coloniser in GEA and beyond. Finally, this article elaborates on how the Indo-German fused the facets of his identity into his vague concept of ‘Indo-Germania’ that both integrated Kaundinya’s religion and transgressed the borders of the colonising empires Britain and Germany.
Passing for White
German colonial discourses about race and identity generally revolved around two aspects. It was either about the trope of being white or not, or around the questions of national identity and belonging. Regarding whiteness, research on North American history describes the strategies of racial ambiguous people to be read as white instead of black as ‘passing for white.’ Individuals of a mixed-race ancestry, having a comparatively white skin colour, straight hair, and even blue eyes, crossed the ‘colour line’ from black to white to evade racist discrimination set and enacted by US-American law and societal conventions.Footnote 11 As whiteness generally featured being Christian and having a middle or upper class lifestyle, blackness was associated with a supposedly ‘heathen’ religion and poverty. Thus, in addition to Christianity, a certain degree of wealth was necessary in order to pass as white. Consequently, those who attempted to cross the ‘colour line’ attached particular importance on corresponding public appearance such as clothing or the display of manners and other practices that fitted the white ideal.Footnote 12 Although most research about passing for white has been done on US-American history, there are also some cases in German history.
Tristan Oestermann has explored how the Afro-Caribbean family of Pagenstecher, for example, had become a respected entrepreneurial family in the circles of Hamburg by the late nineteenth century. At this point, the company of L. Pagenstecher was even the largest trading business in the German colony of Kamerun in West Africa. Consequently, they had an important say in the colonial policies in Kamerun and back home in Hamburg. This was despite the fact that some of the family’s ancestors had been enslaved Africans at sugar plantations in Haiti, while others originated from Patrician families from (North-)West-Germany, and the Haitian upper-class. Although the family maintained lively correspondence with their Haitian relatives in the private sphere, they were anxiously on guard to cultivate those features needed to uphold their white identity in Germany.Footnote 13 Especially in public, they pursued three strategies. First, they relied on their wealth, networked with important families and manipulated their biographies.Footnote 14 Through their wealth, they easily accomplished the public appearance of an upper-class German business family. Second, choosing the right spouses for their children to enlarge the circles of their international business ranging from the Caribbean to the USA, Mexico, and India, as well as Germany and its colonies. Thirdly, they achieved the manipulations of their biographies by constantly veiling their Afro-Caribbean descent in public. Moreover, L. Pagenstecher especially used his influential position to not only foster his rubber business in the German colonies, though he also legitimised German expansionism by articulating corresponding views in German public. Pagenstecher’s business declined significantly after WWI, as the German Empire had to abandon its colonies according to the Treaties of Versailles. While their wealth decreased, the constant and recurring denial of their Afro-Caribbean ancestry remained a successful strategy to pass as white. When the Nazi Regime persecuted many German population groups for racist and political reasons, the Pagenstechers claimed to be solely of ‘Aryan’ descent. In the end, their constant denial of their Afro-Caribbean background apparently saved their lives.Footnote 15
Passing for European?
In contrast to the Pagenstecher family, the Kaundinyas had significantly less resources to pass as white. Undoubtedly, via the global networks of the Protestant Basel Mission, the Christian faith of the Kaundinya’s helped them to pass as white occasionally. Moreover, like his father Herrmann Anandrao, Ranga Reinhardt had married a German woman to strengthen his ties to this Central European nation. His marriage to Thekla Faisst, who came from a good German family near Stuttgart, certainly helped to underpin Ranga’s standing in German society. Moreover, he had received decent schooling through the networks of the Basel Mission and had lived his formative years in Switzerland and Germany. As almost all children of any mission, little Ranga left India for school education in Europe while his parents continued their missionary work on the subcontinent. After school, Kaundinya joined a tree nursery in southwest Germany where he learned the fundamentals of the agricultural business. The latter provided him with the necessary skills to establish some plantations in India in his adult life. The family’s strong affiliation to the global network of the Basel Mission was certainly important for the lives of the family members, both materially and immaterially. Moreover, their shared Pietist faith opened doors to a career at times. It was one of the reasons why Ranga Kaundinya later became manager of the Otto plantation in GEA, as the owner Heinrich Otto was a devout Christian himself.Footnote 16
Whereas the marriages to German women and the global networks of the Basel Mission certainly enhanced the opportunities to pass as white, in contrast to the Pagenstecher family, the Kaundinyas had fewer financial resources to display a white habitus. Ranga Kaundinya’s parents hardly ever had enough money to travel from India to Germany to visit their eleven children. Similarly, although Ranga Kaundinya veils the reasons in his autobiography why he left his coffee and rice plantations in India after twenty three years, it is most plausible that he had turned bankrupt in India by the time he was hired by Otto.Footnote 17 With limited resources to pass as white, Kaundinya thus adjusted his strategies to cope with the racist realities of German colonial society in East Africa. One was to present himself as a European.
Colonial societies, law, and governance discriminated between European and the indigenous population or people of non-European descent for racist reasons. At the same time, it functioned as legitimation of power. In the African colonies, Africans faced the most severe discrimination and violence, of course. Yet, white subalterns like people from Southern Europe and even destitute Central Europeans unable to pursue a middle-class way of life faced discrimination by their fellow German settlers and the German colonial administration alike in GEA. In colonial India, too, poor whites and people of a mixed European Indian origin faced similar exclusion.Footnote 18 In both colonies, the Indo-German Kaundinya family experienced corresponding deferral. Despite his naturalisation as a citizen by the German Kingdom of Württemberg in 1911,Footnote 19 Ranga Kaundinya was one of them. He thus positioned himself as European while living and working in GEA between 1907 and 1914. This is most remarkable, as contemporaries would seldom describe themselves as ‘European.’ Generally, the tropes about identity in (German) colonial sources featured claims of a decidedly German identity or of being white in distinction to the local populations.
Apologetic about the practices of forced labour at his own and other plantations in the German colonies, Kaundinya argued in his autobiography that “egoism alone must compel us – (apart from the sense of justice inherent in every decent fellow Central European) – to treat our workers well and fairly in our own interest […].” At the same time, however, Kaundinya makes no secret about his racist convictions, claiming, “the first impression that almost every normal European gets of the coastal Negro is a repulsive, downright disgusting one.” This mind-set was also the reason why Kaundinya – despite his Indo-German background – naturally positioned himself into the European sphere in the society of GEA. When first arriving near the grounds of his future plantation in Kilossa, he reported: “In the first weeks, we Europeans [sic] lived in a small cottage near the boma [here: colonial fortress].”Footnote 20 Although not uncontested by the resident population(s), all colonial powers attempted to structure any of their settlements in accordance with their racist beliefs. They planned to assign each population group their own residential area. Regardless of their size, colonial working environments like the Otto plantation as well as major colonial cities like Dar es Salaam were intended to allocate the most prestigious quarter to white and/ or European people. They allotted the next best dwellings to Indians or Arabs, and the least privileged areas to the people of African descent. White quarters were either the most central or the highest position of a settlement close to the buildings of the colonial executive. They further featured those dwellings built of the best building materials, ideally stone. With the Indian and Arab quarters obtaining the next best position in the direct neighbourhood of the European quarter and with houses of fair quality, the African population should live on the outskirts of any colonial settlement, close to their actual workplaces. There, they lived in simple huts made from mud and with roofs of grass.Footnote 21
In addition, Kaundinya intertwines the trope of ‘going native’ with the topos of Europeanness at the expense of Germanness or whiteness. One central element of the colonisers’ fear of degeneration in overseas territories was climate. Bearing such reservations regarding potential settlements in mind, Kaundinya judged various parts of GEA as suitable places for European settlers, namely “the extensive highlands around the mountains […] [in the north]. Furthermore, considerable parts of the areas bordering the lakes in the west, as well as […] lands situated on the […] mountains, which run through the middle of [GEA] in a north-south direction.”Footnote 22 In contrast to popular discourses, Kaundinya disputed the idea that the tropical climate, which was favourable to cash crop cultures like cotton, generally had degenerative effects on Europeans.Footnote 23 To Kaundinya, to adapt “completely to tropical conditions,” Central Europeans needed “to spend as much time as possible day and night in […] fresh air with efficient exercise and muscular exertion, and to arrange their way of life according to nature, avoiding as much as possible the consumption of meat, irritating food, alcohol, nicotine, narcotics and medicines, and with strictly regulated moderation in everything.”Footnote 24 His advice was to take moderate sunbaths, as well as ‘air baths,’ i.e. to sleep naked, and to go to bed early every day. Moreover, his Pietist upbringing also inspired Kaundinya’s recommendations. Within the tradition of the Protestant moral reform movement,Footnote 25 he urged for moderation also in sex: “any excess, especially in sexual intercourse, is avenged much more quickly there than in a temperate climate, precisely because of the more invigorating and more crisis-provoking effect of the tropical sun.”Footnote 26 It is obvious from the passages that the plantation manager not only tried to pass as European by portraying the supposedly proper European way of life in a German colony. Publishing in 1918, Kaundinya also sought to comply with the so-called ‘reformed’ colonial policies of Colonial State Secretary Bernhard Dernburg after the anti-colonial Maji Maji War (ca. 1905–1908) had devastated the German colony and claimed the lives of ca. 180,000 peopleFootnote 27 – mostly civilians. From ca. 1907 onwards, Dernburg issued various pieces of legislations that urged the abandonment of colonial excesses of violence and atrocities as well as colonial policies of destruction. Instead, he wanted a rational colonialism that sought to ‘preserve’ the local African population. Although corresponding legislation was introduced, practices of the colonisers, e.g. in working environments, hardly changed. Apart from the fact that German colonial policies really sought to prevent the outbreak of another war, the most important change was rhetorical. This change in discourse is certainly revealed by Kaundinya’s urge to moderation and his rejection of colonial excesses.Footnote 28
Although discourses could slightly change and some nuances could differ from colony to colony, the general advice for any European coloniser was to preserve his whiteness and/ or nationhood. Even though realities in colonial societies differed significantly from these discourses,Footnote 29 the imaginations of a colony functioned as a canvas on which colonialists sketched the idealised twin image of their motherland. For German settlers this idealised new German land was devoid of the political, economic, and social divisions of the modern era. Their ideal revolved around an agricultural society solely inhabited by middle class people aligned to patriarchal (family) ideals. This imagined uniform and conflict-free middle class was not divided by religion (Catholic vs. Protestant) and homogenous in nationality and race. Furthermore, the imagined terra nullius of any colonial territory additionally promised a life in harmonious coexistence with nature. Although the cultivation of this ‘wilderness’ entailed deprivation and laborious work, popular discourse regarded particularly such a lifestyle as the perfect means to refresh the character of the colonisers from the vices and degeneration of the industrial, urban societies. German tropes about proper colonisation especially fused this frontier mentality with the German work ethos. Accordingly, Germans were willing to wring only sparse profits from recently cultivated small-scale farms before they could expect larger profits. This frugal lifestyle, the corresponding tough manners and hard work sustained the German self-image of being altruistic colonisers, who did not work solely for their own profits, but for the progress and sake of all civilised, i.e. European, humanity.Footnote 30 In line with such claims to colonial superiority, Kaundinya addressed his German-speaking audience in his books about GEA and India. In these publications released during WWI, he identified himself not only as a European, but also as an experienced German colonial planter. Equally, he criticised the British for their colonial policies to India and made implicit references to his Pietist background.
German Colonial Expertise and Pietism
Besides evoking his European identity, Kaundinya also served and used the ideologies characteristic of a white coloniser. One central strategy to pass as white in German colonial East Africa was the abovementioned (big game) hunt. Hunting features repeatedly in his written accounts published in 1918 and in several visual sources.Footnote 31 Living and working in East Africa, the prestigious big game hunt was literally round the corner and Kaundinya was convinced that “every European must possess weapons in Africa.”Footnote 32 However, he does not present himself as a ruthless hunter who shot down anything what came in front of his rifle; rather, he presents himself as a man who knows to distinguish between ‘good’ and ‘evil’ when shooting animals: “Hunting antelopes that look so innocent, […] has never given me pleasure. Only hunting predators could become a justified passion. I virtually hate these beasts. [It is] a real passion […] to persecute and exterminate them in any way possible.”Footnote 33 The distinction between ‘innocent’ and ‘guilty’ African wildlife further fostered Kaundinya’s self-image of an experienced colonial expert also in the (big game) hunt. Equally, chasing dangerous animals contributed to display the martial prowess of a colonial hyper-masculine identity. Big men were to shoot big cats and not minor animals, of course. It is further no coincidence that especially the colonial military regarded hunting as the perfect sport to train their soldiers for warfare not only in East Africa but also in especially India.Footnote 34
In addition, Kaundinya’s differentiation in a supposedly ‘good’ and ‘evil’ hunt rooted in part certainly in his Pietistic background and his strong ties to southwestern Germany. From the 1830s onwards, it was influential Pietists from Württemberg indeed, who were central figures in the foundation of the very first German societies for the protection of animals (Tierschutzvereine). Especially at the turn to the twentieth century, Pietists from this region like Immanuel Kammerer (1857–1927) were simultaneously involved in the Basel Mission and it is plausible that Kaundinya had processed their ideas since his youth. As Pietistic thought regarded beasts as fellow creatures (Mitgeschöpflichkeit), it considered an animal’s individuality and its emotions.Footnote 35 Fusing his self-image of a virile, white colonial hunter with central elements of his Protestant identity, Kaudinya analogically named an antelope (Buschbock), whom he saw repeatedly around the plantation, his “special friend” whose shooting he would have considered “murder.”Footnote 36 Furthermore, Kaundinya ponders in his autobiography what elephants must have thought when visiting his emerging plantation in Kilossa repeatedly. He further suggested the creation of national parks to protect elephants. Although he admitted that such measurements would on the one hand “impede [the elephants’] freedom,” they would preserve them as a species on the other hand and “educate” them to become “pets, friends and workmates” of the colonisers in Africa.Footnote 37
With respect to national parks, the plantation manager’s thoughts on colonial hunting expressed contemporary reservations towards excessive hunting safaris to Africa, too. Similar considerations were also part of the ‘reformed’ colonial policies after ca. 1907. Indeed, the big game hunt threatened certain species like elephants with extinction. Counter-measures such as the introduction of nature conservation areas or national parks as well as hunting control legislations around the world were strategies to tackle the problem also on the African continent. Of course, animal and nature protection policies were also labelled as benevolent to the local African populations. Yet such measurements often served the colonisers’ interests. They dispossessed the land of the local populations and forced them to live in reserves instead of their homelands, now declared as conservation area, for instance. Moreover, the colonisers further excluded them from hunting in these newly established areas as they judged local techniques of hunting like trapping as illegitimate and not fitting the ‘sporting code.’ The latter applied exclusively to the usage of (fire) arms when killing animals and thus to the colonisers’ way of hunting.Footnote 38
The plantation manager’s recurring explanations which animals could be killed for a sound reason and which creatures were deemed the right to live appear to have been further rooted in the tradition of German Romantic Natural History. This rather practical branch of natural history combined science with economics and differentiated between ‘useful’ and ‘harmful’ species.Footnote 39 As Kaundinya only shot antelopes to supply his ‘people’ – probably his workers – with the necessary amount of meat, he attributes especially big cats the status of vermin. Characterising especially man-eating big cats as vermin, they were hunted down ruthlessly. The cats of prey obtained the same low status as boars or baboons, which were equally regarded as pests.Footnote 40 To Kaundinya, such discourses about wildlife also came in handy to link his thoughts on hunting with tropes of racism. In his circa seven-year stay in GEA, he boasted in his autobiography that he had shot almost “one thousand”Footnote 41 baboons as they showed both the allegedly brutal habits of a big cat and were cunning and sneaky especially when they plundered the shambas Footnote 42 of the local populations or the fields of the plantation in Kilossa. In this respect, these animals reminded Kaundinya of “a thieving pack of gypsies”Footnote 43 directing the reader to another central element of Kaundinya’s writing: his racist beliefs and the corresponding conviction for the utmost necessity of German colonial rule.
On many occasions, Kaundinya took a decidedly pro-German view regarding colonialism and expansionism in his memoirs. Written and published during WWI and addressing a German readership, Kaundinya repeatedly praised German colonialism especially in East Africa. Furthermore, he describes his own involvement in Kilossa as a “patriotic duty” and speaks about “our [i.e. German] colonies” on several occasions. To his mind, these colonies had been illegitimately occupied by competing European Empires during WWI.Footnote 44 He further believed that ‘educat[ing] the local populations to work,’ which was one of the central ideologies perpetrated in the colonisation of African territories, was best done “through German influence[.]”Footnote 45 Consequently, he criticised competing imperial powers repeatedly. Besides France, he directed his major attacks towards Britain. Echoing the tropes on the reasons for WWI’s outbreak prominent in German discourse at the time, Kaundinya accused the Anglo-Saxons of controlling global trade flows and supply chains. Omitting the hegemonic strivings of other imperial nations, including Germany, Kaundinya claimed that the British envy of the German (economic) rise of the nineteenth century was the main reason for the war.Footnote 46 Giving such statements constantly in his autobiography, Kaundinya generally conceals the fact that he had lived in the British Empire for a long time and had obtained German citizenship only after 1911.Footnote 47 Moreover, he is seldom explicit about his Indian family history. Yet, especially when trying to sketch the self-image of being a competent and experienced colonial planter, Kaundinya refers to this very part of his identity.
Kaundinya’s Indian Dimensions of Identity
Ranga Kaundinya’s autobiography about his time as plantation manager in GEA does not explicitly refer to his Indo-German ancestry. If at all, he addresses this part of his biography when trying to portray himself as a competent plantation manager. In this respect, his Indian descent and his twenty-three-year-experience as a planter in India comes in handy. Moreover, in his book, his Indian experience serves both as a blueprint for his life in GEA and for his employment at the cotton plantation in Kilossa. By fulfilling his ‘patriotic duty’ and becoming the manager of the Otto cotton plantation, Kaundinya claimed to have left his thriving plantations in India behind, where he had worked and lived for a long time. Stressing the difficulties when starting business in Kilossa, he compared his work in the British Empire to his new occupation in GEA: “The most important and valuable realisation was that despite twenty-three years of experience as a tropical planter, I had to completely retrain in many respects in Africa, because these conditions could not be compared with India.”Footnote 48 Following this insight, Kaundinya repeatedly compared the performance of the East African workers, the German colonial economy in East Africa, the colonial administration’s policies and the entire social and environmental realities to India.
Illustrating again the importance of the big game hunt for the imagery of colonial rule, this applies first to the opportunities for successful hunting. Praising East Africa for its abundance of venison in comparison to the subcontinent, he admitted that in “India,” he had “once shot a few lovebirds for expected guests in the absence of other meat.”Footnote 49 Regarding cotton cultivation, too, the plantation manager felt that the crops grown in coastal Sadaani were “quite luxuriant compared to the state and appearance of cotton [he] was used to in India [.]”Footnote 50 Equally, the cultivation of vast palm tree plantations allegedly “had a bright future” in GEA and Kaundinya claimed to be able to judge the vast areas of the German colony’s climate at least as suitable for planting palm trees as that of southern India.Footnote 51
Despite the promising conditions to grow cash crops such as cotton, Kaundinya struggled to recruit and keep sufficient plantation workers at Kilossa. These difficulties were partially rooted in the general refusal of most Africans to take up plantation labour to evade low colonial wages, general (physical) abuse at the workplace, and insufficient medical treatment and food supply. Another reason was that the Otto Company – in line with the call to the rational ‘reformed’ colonial policies after 1907 – had planned to save large amounts of labour costs by introducing modern machinery. This plan failed miserably due to serious misjudgements of the machinery’s advantages in GEA, however. To keep the steam engines running, the ploughs needed constant supplies of water and firewood, which required a great amount of African labour. Moreover, the ploughs were very heavy, sinking into the soaked grounds during the rainy season. In addition, the machines turned the soil up too deeply, unearthing layers that were hardly fertile for any cotton crop. Despite the favourable climate and environment in Kilossa, Kaundinya soon realised that he would remain decisively dependent on Africans qualified to take up the hard work of cotton cultivation.Footnote 52
Evaluating the work performance of his staff, Kaundinya compared the output of African to Indian plantation workers. When confronting his Greek overseer with the insufficient work results done by his cohort of East African workers, Kaundinya stressed that he was used to better results in India. Countering the criticism of his boss, the European employee replied: “But Sir, Mr Manager, in India you have human beings, very intelligent human beings, but these here, they are apes, they are beasts […]!”Footnote 53 The Indo-German plantation manager attributed the significantly lower output of the African workers to their allegedly lower level of civilisation and their shorter habituation to colonial labour. Recalling that Kaundinya was himself discriminated as ‘half oriental’ because of his Indo-German background, it is crucial to note that similar discourses targeted also Southeast Europeans living in GEA, Greeks in particular. Kaundinya’s conversation with his Greek plantation assistant thus highlights how different layers of discrimination and identification intersected and how ‘passing for whiteness’ came to the fore in colonial contexts. Research on colonial railway building has revealed how South (East) Europeans obtained a conflict laden intermediate position between black and white in the German colony. In fact, they were indispensable as railway sub-contractors for the construction of the Central Railway in the colony. As labour recruiters, they were also significant for the functioning of the entire colonial labour market. In fact, the German colonisers did not acknowledge their superior work performance, because the shenzi ulaya (‘white negro’) trope rated them below German Central Europeans. Yet, despite their own discrimination, South (East) Europeans in GEA treated Africans as violently as Central Europeans especially in contexts of work. They physically abused the African workforce by beatings or deprived them of their wages or of sufficient food and medical supplies or decent housing. They also looked down on the African population for racist reasons and regarded themselves as superior in turn.Footnote 54
This was also typical for most Indians living in German and British colonies. As Imperial subjects of the British Empire and as a significant middlemen minority in the (African) territories, Indians working as clerks and especially in financial services, as well as in trading, resented racist discrimination on behalf of the white colonisers. Yet, they regarded people of African descent as inferior at the same time. Indian white-collar workers further distanced themselves from indentured labourers from the subcontinent in colonial Africa and stressed their belonging to a higher class.Footnote 55 Analogically, Kaundinya presented himself as an experienced colonial planter, who had – despite his Indian family background – nothing in common with the working classes, neither those originating in the subcontinent, nor those from Africa. Similarly, when arriving in Dar es Salaam for the first time, the plantation manager reported his first tour through the colony’s capital. As in most colonial settlements, the colonisers planned to align each population group in its own quarter. Attempting to meet racist ideologies, also GEA’s capital had a quarter designed for Europeans only, one designed exclusively for Indians and Arabs, and one for the African population.Footnote 56 Although resident populations often influenced colonial policies of urban planning,Footnote 57 European visitors to Dar es Salaam generally described the different quarters of the city in accordance with colonial planning ideals. In this respect, Kaundinya was no exception, yet with one profound difference: he omitted the Indian quarter from his tour: “The Indian, Arab and Negro quarters […] are of particular interest to the foreigner. The Negro quarter seemed particularly peculiar to me. I knew enough Indians and Arabs from India.” Despite his recurring claim to a European identity and his general emphasis on German colonial discourses, his Indian background obviously also influenced his perception of cities like Dar es Salaam. At the same time, this Indian facet of his identity intermingled with both the plantation manager’s class identity and his Pietistic background: when visiting Dar es Salaam’s African quarter, he ranks the local African inhabitants explicitly below the “working classes” of the subcontinent whom he had encountered during his year-long stay in India. Labelling these Indian workers as “pariahs” further intersects class with race and even caste, as the term ‘pariah’ also describe(d) people of no caste, generally also referred to as ‘dalits’ or ‘untouchables’ in India. From the 1890s onwards, especially Protestant missionaries addressed their living and working conditions in the colonial society of the subcontinent.Footnote 58 Despite his own distancing from the working classes and the casteless, Kaundinya’s awareness towards the ‘pariah problem’ reveals his upbringing in the Protestant missionary environment of the Pietist Basel Mission to India once again.
Regarding the Indian influence on his identity, one passage in his autobiography is most striking. On one occasion, Kaundinya calls India his Heimat.Footnote 59 The German term has many connotations, translating into one’s home, origin, or homeland. Heimat simultaneously implies ideas about specific German culture, manners, society, or even collective character. Using the term Heimat thus entails Kaundinya’s profound affection to one of his homelands indeed. In fact, he attempted to exploit his Indian background not only when reporting about his life as a planter in GEA. He also made use of his Indo-German identity when addressing the German audience about fundamental questions regarding WWI and sketched his individual Indo-German identity that spanned across empires and incorporated his religion.
Indo-German Identity Across Empires
In addition to his autobiography, Ranga Kaundinya published a sixty-page long pamphlet under the pen name Ganga-rao Brahmputr. He elaborated on India’s role in the geopolitics of WWI, its role during and after the war, and its relationship to the British Empire and the German Reich. According to his own accounts, close friends encouraged him to share his expertise with the public. After a favourably received lecture on the subject, Kaundinya chose to publish on the issue to “promote the understanding of Indian life in Germany.”Footnote 60 In his pamphlet, Kaundinya explains why the once proud nation of India had fallen victim to British imperialism and had not yet been able to escape the yoke of colonial rule. In his view, the reasons were manifold and intertwined. First, the Indian populations did not possess any arms to fight against British rule. Secondly and in line with the Romantic German image of India,Footnote 61 they were generally of a peaceful character. Thirdly, Indian society was divided between Hindu and Muslims and between different castes. Without unity, joint action against colonial rule was allegedly impossible and the British could easily divide and rule by exerting decisive influence on few Maharajas with competing interests. Finally, the omnipresent multilingualism literally prevented mutual understanding while the English-language press acted as the voice of the British rulers.Footnote 62
Kaundinya presented himself as an expert with the ability to explain German, British, and Indian politics especially because of his Indo-German background. As the son of an ancient Brahmin family and his father’s education in Europe and his conversion to Christianity, Kaundinya “had many an opportunity to make observations and gain an insight into internal Indian conditions that other Europeans [did] not have.”Footnote 63 Besides the significance of his parents, Kaundinya also used his own upbringing in Europe and India to qualify himself as an expert on international relations. Of course, he also referred to his professional life as a planter in Asia and East Africa:
After I had enjoyed my education in Switzerland and Germany, I worked for almost 25 years in various parts of India and made […] frequent journeys on which I was able to establish relationships with high-ranking Indians [especially Brahmins] […]. […] I often took part in discussions about India’s […] interests and was made privy to many a situation that remains closed to other Europeans.Footnote 64
Such insights into Indian society intermingled smoothly with Kaundinya’s experience in GEA. He thus established an analogy between the gradients of the colonial society there and the caste system in India. He particularly compared the seclusion of the Brahmin caste to the colonial strivings to keep black and white apart from one another. Kaundinya explained that there was no “Indian race” as such, but numerous races that peopled the Indian sub-continent without any closer interaction or “blood mixture[.]”Footnote 65 The major reason for the genesis of castes in India had ensued from the higher castes’ avoidance of degeneration, i.e. their refusal to intermarry with allegedly lower castes especially from the darker skinned peoples living on the Indian subcontinent. Kaundinya claims: “[…] [O]ne explanation, generally accepted among Brahmins […], seems most plausible, namely that the primary purpose of caste was to preserve the purity of blood, mainly as a protection for the light-coloured and culturally superior Aryans against intermarriage with the dark-coloured, culturally inferior aborigines.”Footnote 66 In fact, the genesis of caste in India has been a historical process that evolved over hundreds of years and intertwined various religious, legal, and socio-economic currents. Especially in periods of socio-political instability and profound change, caste fostered the identity of society’s social groups. Likewise, especially new rulers like the British from the eighteenth century onwards used caste to not only structure their view on the unfamiliar Indian society; they also used it as a tool for colonial rule. Certainly, caste had been important for social stratification of pre-colonial India, but British rulers first codified caste into a form of European law to sustain British imperial dominance over the subcontinent. For instance, they preferably incorporated adherents of a perceived warlike caste into the colonial military especially after the Great Rebellion in 1857. Although concepts of caste were contested even among the colonisers, the British intertwined caste increasingly with European race theories that became the dominant worldview especially towards the end of the nineteenth century.Footnote 67
Likewise, Kaundinya analogised German colonial law making and corresponding jurisdiction regarding mixed-race marriages similar to the perception of caste in the colonial era. He added to his passage about the alleged Aryan rejection to marry people of ‘lower’ castes: “One is involuntarily reminded of the analogous problem that has been so much in the news in the German colonies in recent years: the problem of mixed marriages [‘Mischehen’] between white and black and their legal validity.”Footnote 68 Yet, he largely ignored the complexity and longevity of caste in India, devoid of contemporary racist thought. His equation of German colonial law with caste in India was rather an illustration of the author’s strategy to position himself in the society of his target audience. Living in a territory predominantly peopled by Africans, the colonisers established legal and societal barriers to separate black from white artificially. Besides social norms aimed to prevent any community with the colonised population, the abovementioned laws to prevent, annul or complicate mixed-race marriages were certainly the most important tool. Besides the fact that sexualised violence and rape exerted by European men over African women were common in the colonial context, Kaundinya’s warnings of sexual debaucheries quoted above certainly also alludes to interracial sexuality primarily through prostitution in the colonies and legislation against mixed marriages from ca. 1905 onwards that were hotly debated in the German parliament, especially in 1912.Footnote 69
Besides, Kaundinya was surely aware of topical debates and discourses about interracial marriages in the German colonies, when referring on the so-called Mischehen (‘mixed-marriages’) in the German colonies. As the child of an Indian father and a German mother and married to a German woman himself, there is no doubt that manoeuvring around such controversial debates must have been the prerequisite to pass either as European or as white in the German (colonial) context. Without his decided positioning as white, German and European, he would have certainly risked the accusation of having a mixed-race marriage himself. Born and raised in the colonising and colonised societies of Germany and Britain between the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century, Ranga Kaundinya thus regarded any societies he had experienced through the lens of biological racism prevalent at the time. Especially so, as he and his entire family had been targets of similar discourses not only in Central Europe (Germany and Switzerland), but also in GEA and in India.Footnote 70
The ideas of Kaundinya’s pamphlet certainly drew their origins from various sources. The Indo-German appears to have gathered them through selective reading. Although it is hardly possible to reconstruct the genesis of Kaundinya’s mind-set in detail, it certainly derived from widespread discourses in Europe about India since the late eighteenth century. They further intersected with nineteenth century racism and geopolitics. With the beginnings of East Indian Company (EIC) rule in India, various European scholars in the Service of the EIC had explored the interconnections between India and Europe. Orientalists such as William Jones (1746-1794) and the German Max Müller (1823-1900) researched the interconnections between ancient Greek, Latin, and Sanskrit. They proved the linguistic relationships and thus provided for the evidence of the existence of the Indo Germanic language family. Consequently, the “German-speaking region in particular became embroiled in a literal ‘Indomania,’ which became part of German nation-building processes, above all through […] the relationship of German to Sanskrit.”Footnote 71
However, this linguistic and national relationship was open to various interpretations. Whereas Müller, who was not only a linguist, but also a religious scholar, advocated a friendly Indo-British relationship deriving from the linguistic connection, the analysis of the history of the Aryans also inspired racist legitimation of colonial rule not only throughout the British Empire, but also in other colonizing nations. Analogically, Kaundinya’s pamphlet contains implicit references to other popular paradigms of contemporary racist thought. They feature repeatedly in Kaundinya’s publications. For instance, he analogises the caste system and the seclusion of the Brahmins from other castes to the homogeneity of the European nobility and the feudal hierarchy of the Estates Society (Ständegesellschaft):
It appears beyond doubt that caste […] already existed in the original homeland of the Aryans […] as a distinction of status, which all Indo-European peoples observed from the earliest times, and which is still partly preserved in the European peoples today, […] between the nobility, the clergy, the military class (warriors), the middle classes and the serfs (formerly peasants).Footnote 72
Here, Kaundinya’s ideas certainly derived from major assumptions of Arthur de Gobineau (1816-1882). Gobineau – diplomat, writer and race theorist – had developed his ideas about race and nobility especially with respect to France. One major idea of his thinking was that European nobility had preserved racial purity. As one of the most fundamental thinkers of European racist thought, Gobineau’s ideas quickly spread through Europe’s fin du siècle and it appears that also Kaundinya had incorporated Gobineau’s major ideas to his writing. While Gobineau’s claims were very influential throughout the ‘long nineteenth century,’ it was especially Houston Steward Chamberlain, who processed them further, additionally fused orientalists’ research to his own agenda, and added Anti-Semitism to Gobineau’s views. Especially Chamberlain’s bestseller The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century (‘Die Grundlagen des Neunzehnten Jahrhunderts’ 1899) popularised racist and anti-Semitic ideology throughout Europe, but especially in Germany.Footnote 73 Furthermore, Chamberlain, who was in close contact to Philosophers and Indologists like the German Paul Deussen (1845–1919), relocated the alleged Aryan heartland from Asia to Central Europe, i.e. to Germany.Footnote 74 Like many of his contemporaries, Chamberlain was therefore “decided on the ideologically charged search for the original homeland of the Indo-Arya,”Footnote 75 which highlighted the importance of Germany in history and its significance for India’s future in particular.
Ranga Kaundinya had certainly processed the works or at least the major ideas of Gobineau, Chamberlain, and Deussen and reached similar conclusions. Rather than insinuating a special relationship between Britain and India, he took a decidedly German colonial view. Instead of Britain, Germany had or rather should develop a special relationship to India. In line with his Protestant-Brahmin background, he thus first criticized pre-colonial Brahmin rule in India and analogised it to the deficiencies of British colonialism. Although having preserved the alleged racial pureness for many hundred years, Brahmin dominance in India had failed to elevate the lower castes of India by means of education. To Kaundinya’s mind, Christian missionaries involved in the European colonial endeavour had acted better than the old established Indian ruling caste. The Brahmins, he argued, “are guilty of not doing anything at all for the elevation of the lowly population; on the contrary, they detested them and only drove them further […] into their filth and oppression and left them to their own devices.” Neither did the British, he added, claiming that only the Christian missions had been working towards “the elevation of these poorest of all people […].”Footnote 76 Here, Kaundinya fuses his Brahmin background with the Christian identity of his family. By praising the missionaries’ work in India, which was not uncontested at the time,Footnote 77 Kaundinya implicitly claimed his legitimate belonging to colonising societies at the expense of his Brahmin descent. Through the clear criticism of English colonial rule to India, he further directs his readership to his vision for Indian German relations after WWI.
Rejecting the idea to replace British simply with German colonial rule in India, the Indo-German proposes a profound informal alliance between the German and the Indian intelligentsia (i.e. Brahmins) instead. Germany and India should develop stronger political and economic ties at eye level. The resulting alliance would oust British global dominance and serve Germany and India alike:
Recently, one likes to speak of an alliance for the preservation of world peace for the future, a protective strip from the North Sea over the Balkans to the Persian Gulf. Why stop there? […] Why should it not be possible in the not too distant future to create a newly revised Indo-Germania, leaving out the disloyal Latin peoples, to which, according to Dr Karl Peters, Britain also belongs?Footnote 78
Generally, Kaundinya’s idea about Indo-Germania remained hazy, as he did not elaborate on this idea in detail. Yet especially his reference to “the protective strip from the North Sea over the Balkans to the Persian Gulf” suggests that Kaundinya alluded to geopolitical theories. Geopolitics gained profound popularity during WWI and became one of the most famous ideas to explain human history, global politics and economy especially during Weimar Germany. Geopolitical thought further attempted to equip states and empires with strategies for their security policies to sustain, regain or enhance their power. The discipline borrowed central ideas from political geography. Foundational thinkers like the Germanophile Swede Rudolf Kjellén regarded (nation-)states as living organisms. As organisms, states could thus either grow or diminish. That means, they either could choose to expand to live or were doomed at the expense of a competitor. During WWI and the Weimar Republic and beyond, demands for geopolitical dominance over vast areas were widespread in Germany. They had many origins: German science, alongside German companies, literary authors, and the public hotly debated how Germany could – after or through the victory of WWI – succeed in creating an as autarkic as possible Reich. Through a big variety of geopolitical measurements ranging from political alliances, via large-scale infrastructure building to economic and financial investments, the long-term goal of abundant raw material supplies, sales markets for industrial products and spaces for German settlers ought to secure the global dominance or rather the actual survival of the Reich. Moreover, one central idea was the creation of a sort of a protective spatial shield around Germany. That meant the erection of corridors next to the German borders, inhabited by either German settlers or Germanophile people; they would defend the Reich’s heartland acting as a buffer against competing neighbours.Footnote 79 In this respect, Ranga Kaundinya’s reference to ‘the protective strip’ from the North Sea to the Persian Gulf all the way to India was most likely an amalgamation of contemporary strands of geopolitical thought with comparatively old-established ideas originating from Orientalism to racist thought.
Kaundinya’s reference to Carl Peters is furthermore remarkable. Peters had been one of the German colonial ‘pioneers,’ having scammed local rulers in East Africa for territories at the very beginning of formal German colonialism in Africa in the 1880s. However, Peters had fallen in disgrace by the turn of the century. His excesses of violence had caused public outcry even among the pro-colonial German public of the 1890s. After WWI, especially the pro-colonial propaganda of the Nazi Regime rehabilitated Carl Peters as one of the most important German colonial heroes. As Peters had always envied the British Empire and sought for German colonial equality,Footnote 80 Kaundinya’s reference is further striking. Having lived in the British Empire for a long time, the Indo-German criticised British colonial rule in India harshly, nevertheless. He thus opted for a new ‘Indo-Germania’ that united the Reich and the subcontinent at the expense of Great Britain. He further shared Peters’ claim that Britons had no special relationship to the ancient Aryans of the Indian subcontinent. As allegedly Latin people, Kaundinya echoed old-established Orientalist views and judged the British as non-Aryan. Consequently, he declared them as unfit colonial rulers to India implicitly. Instead, the real Aryans, i.e. the Germans, should develop strong, yet just ties to the subcontinent. To Kaundinya’s mind, this connection would revive the alleged original Aryan connection between Europe and the sub-continent. It thus appears that his fantasy of an Indo-German alliance at eye level acted as another strategy to position his identity not only across the colonising empires Britain and Germany, but also between his German and Indian homelands as well as his Christian-missionary and Brahmin-Indian backgrounds.
Conclusion
The Indo-German Ranga Reinhardt Kaundinya grew up in his family’s missionary environment in southern India. As a youth, he lived in the educational environment of the Protestant Basel Mission in Europe and later returned to India as a colonial planter. After almost twenty-five years of work on the sub-continent, his Pietist ties to the German textile company Otto enabled him to work as a colonial cotton planter in GEA from 1907 onwards. When on holiday to Germany in 1914, the outbreak of WWI prevented him from returning to East Africa. Now devoid of a job, he wrote about his life and work in India, Germany and especially GEA and gave corresponding lectures. In both a visual source and in his two publications, he produced his self-image and drew on several strategies of identification that were mobilised for private, commercial, and political aims to access resources and influence in different geographical and societal contexts that spanned from GEA, via India to (post)colonial Germany.
Kaundinya’s self-identification were certainly a reaction towards the identification of others. Vilified as ‘half-oriental’ by his contemporaries, core ideas of his publications certainly had economic and defensive motives. Written and published during WWI and only recently naturalised as a citizen of Württemberg in 1911, Ranga Kaundinya undoubtedly attempted to be regarded as German (enough) in the atmosphere of the war. He was certainly aware of the fact that individuals of a mixed descent often faced internment as POWs as every war party generally doubted the national reliability of people with diverse backgrounds. He thus evaded potential identifications of others as a British enemy. Stranded in Germany as the war prevented him from returning to GEA to his job as plantation manager, his accounts may also be read as a public ‘letter of application’ for potential future jobs in the plantation business. Although focussing primarily on German employers, his occasional claim to European identity seems to go beyond the German target audience. It is very likely that Kaundinya, who had not only worked as a planter in East Africa but also in southern India, would have readily taken a job at a similar enterprise in the colony of an imperial power other than Germany, although he certainly preferred a Central European employer.
Kaundinya’s practices of self-identification were further located in changing societal environment(s) and between race, class, gender and religion. When he came to East Africa in 1907, German military rule was increasingly replaced by ‘reformed’ policies that demanded rational colonialism. Accordingly, Kaundinya sketched his identity of being an experienced and reflected, yet virile, white coloniser when reporting his past in GEA. To distance himself from the allegedly uncivilised African environment, he further portrayed himself as an expert in the (big) game hunt, who included the latest ideas of Natural History, nature conversation measurements, and (religiously justified) animal protection rights. Besides race and gender as dimensions of self-identification, he displayed his competence as a middle-class planter. Especially in this regard, he also drew on his previous experience as a plantation manager in India but distanced himself simultaneously from the working classes, i.e. indentured labourers, and casteless from the subcontinent. At the same time aware of his family’s and his own discrimination as Indo-Germans, Kaundinya used several strategies to distance himself from the competing colonising nations of Germany.
The Indo-German sought special distance from Britain, although he and his family had lived in the major colony of the Empire for a long time. Instead, he praised German colonialism particularly in East Africa and criticized British colonial policies in India. He declared British rule to India as inadequate as the precolonial rule of the Brahmins over the sub-continent. Only Christian missionaries had done their part for the improvement of Indian society. In this regard, Kaundinya especially distanced himself from his Brahmin family background and highlighted the Christian (missionary) history of himself and his closest relatives. Drawing further on prominent claims of Orientalism, racism, and geopolitics, Kaundinya further sketched a special relationship between the ancient Aryan Indian tradition and evolving ideas of the supposedly Aryan descent of the German people. His vague vision of a future Indo-Germania was the most prominent expression of this idea. This vision presented the British as non-Aryans and thus as illegitimate colonial rulers to India. In turn, Germany should replace the British Empire in India, albeit with the big difference that Kaundinya imagined this Indo-German relationship at eye level. Certainly, an equal connection between the Reich and the sub-continent would have provided Kaundinya with a society where his Indo-German background would cease to be a matter of discrimination and foster the integration of both of his family strands instead.
In his texts, his repeated claim to a European identity is most striking. Such claims are generally absent from similar sources issued in this period. Despite economic motives and the possible integration of his family history, it appears that Ranga Kaundinya’s claim to Europeanness was also a strategy to manoeuvre around the borders prevailing before and tightening during the war. His call to Europeanness was also an attempt to fend off rising hostilities between the two colonial powers during WWI. For Ranga Reinhardt Kaundinya, his self-identifications were partly successful. Although he faced discrimination in both Germany and Britain, because of the Indian part of his background, he nevertheless managed to access resources and influence in different geographical and temporal contexts. They ranged from GEA, via India to (southwest) Germany until his unexpected death in 1920. Kaundinya’s vague idea of Indo-Germania finally appears as an envisioned realm of self-identification that he had developed through his experience across the colonising empires Britain and Germany as well as through his German-Christian-missionary and Brahmin-Indian backgrounds.
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